I've looked at the topic of home field advantage before (although I think
it's been a few years) and came away somewhat dissatisfied with the results
(there, there, it's all right; I'm generally dissatisfied with most of what
I do -- that's why I keep working). This week I want to try out a new
metric that I think cuts a little finer by utilizing a measure that takes
game scores into account as well as wins and losses. The one downside to
it is that the final measure doesn't translate into any easily-understood
measure like runs or games, but it at least gives us an interesting ranking
to talk about.

What I've done (and I'm going to be intentionally sketchy on the math this
time, just because it's not that interesting) is to look at a modified
version of a metric called Strength of Victory (SOV), which comes from the
football world and which Paul Kislanko reminded me of recently. Very
roughly speaking, SOV is the difference of the scores divided by the sum
of the scores in a game, so that in almost every case the result is a good
measure of how much a team dominates a game. The version I'm using runs
from -1 (being shut out) through 0 (a tie, not that there's any such thing)
to 1 (shutting the other team out).

The disadvantage of using just win-loss figures, besides the small number
of home-road pairs that each team gets, is that really good or bad teams
tend to win or lose consistently in both locations. If a team is 11-1 in
conference at home and 10-2 on the road, that doesn't really tell you
much about their home field advantage. On the other hand, if they won the
home games by an average of 10-3 and the road games 7-5, that's useful
information. Using the SOV takes that into account. Since it's a ratio,
so that a 6-4 game counts the same as a 9-6 game, it also eliminates the
park factor from consideration, since both teams' scores are affected to
the park factor cancels out. The one weakness comes from the nature of
0, so a 2-0 shutout is considered the same as 12-0. We'll just have to
live with that, since it doesn't come up often enough in college ball to
really change things.

What I'm looking at, then, is the difference in the average home SOV and
the average road SOV for each team for games against teams that they played
both home and away in the last four years (the same data set used to
construct the park factors). Here are the twenty-five teams who seem to
do the best job of taking advantage of their home park:

The number is just the difference in the home average SOV and the road
average SOV; don't pay too much attention to it. I'm ignoring a few
teams here -- teams that haven't been in D1 for four years aren't included,
since they don't have enough pairs to trust the results, and Hawaii-Hilo
is ignored, since their schedule cause some major headaches in trying
to evaluate park effects and related events like this.

Some of these teams get to take some major advantage of their advantage, so
to speak -- the days when Texas never, ever left home are gone, but they
still play at home an awful lot, for example. Others don't, really; Wright
State, for example, doesn't have that many non-conference home games.

There are actually about thirty teams that appear to play better on the
road, in absolute terms, than they do at home. Here's the bottom
twenty-five:

The bottom of this list appears to be mostly northeastern, but I can't
spot a weather reason for it, since almost all of the home-away pairs for
these guys are conference games or series against reasonably close
geographic neighbors. Arizona's presence is interesting; I'm not sure
what the implications are of having a major conference team that plays
slightly better on the road, but I could make up some interesting
scenarios.

One thing that I don't notice, which sort of blows my closing, is any
correlation between these numbers and the reputation of the programs for
the quality of their facilities; most of the stadia generally regarded as
best are not on the top list, and some of the ones on the bottom list are
regarded as quite nice.

Tournament Watch

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament.
I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since
the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one
team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the
automatic bid.

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher
usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a
standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel
free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you.
This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have
caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches
or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if
I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.